Vacant Memories
by a vestige of peace
Summary: She is here and now, where she should be. He is there and alone, as he should be. There was never a Sengoku Jidai; there never was a little girl with a lopsided smile. But Kagome remembers - and so does he. Why doesn't anyone else? Sess/Kag
1. Chapter one: Echoes of Rin

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. I'm an undergraduate with no published work to speak of... unless you include my facebook notes. Which I wouldn't. So, I really don't own anything... literary or abstract. I do own a very shiny american apparel gym bag, though.. and its reeeally shiny. I think I want to make love to it- just a little bit.**

******Author's note: This is try number 2. I'm starting this baby up again. New readers- hello. Tell me how u like it. I can't write on without feedback.:(**

"In sleep he sang to me  
In dreams he came  
That voice which calls to me  
And speaks my name  
And do I dream again?  
For now I find  
The phantom of the opera is there,  
Inside my mind"

_The Phantom of the Opera_

**Talk to me**

"Sesshoumaru-sama!"

First, was the call.

It announced to every creature; youkai, flower, butterfly and flea, of his presence. No matter that he had a tremendously overpowering demonic aura for that. Who knew if all the flowers could sense demonic auras, after all. But her piping notes they could all sense. He was sure of it.

From far away, almost before he could detect her small presence, the cry would reverberate through the air around him. Again, and again, his sensitive ears would catch the sound from the wind, as she threw his name at him in her joy. She was his very own trumpeter: reliably vociferous at his every arrival, regardless of the occasion.

Second, there was always the delighted giggle following the announcement. This, the Great Demon Lord idly imagined, was to ward off fear from the hearts of all her delicate companions. It reassured them that the announcement was a happy one,a safe one , and not a warning. Her master could hurt no one. Sesshoumaru might have explained to her how it was, in reality, very much otherwise, but there was nothing real or even remotely conventional about Rin, so he never bothered. Because, despite what he _could_or _could not_, her little voice told the truth, as always. Lord Sesshoumaru would harm nothing that befriended Rin.

Then, there would be the drum roll of pattering feet. They would get louder and clumsier as she got closer, her gap-toothed smile stretching to an impossible width. It would tell him to retract his claws, tow down his formidable aura, and seal tight his poison ducts.

It would make Tenseiga lord over Toukijin's evil. Nothing must hurt this ward of the Taiyoukai.

And there would be an "ooff" and a thud, and suddenly little Rin would be pressed against his knee like a big, flowery leech.

He would look down at her, traces of his signature look of disdain still pulling down on his pale, aristocratic features, but they would be softened, for once. For _her_. From stone, he would turn to flesh, for her. Subtle, and very much hidden to the unobservant eye, there would be, tucked beneath the hard expression, a smile. A small one. One neither Rin, nor Jaken ever saw, but one that the benign Lord of the Western Lands chose to give, regardless of the fact that it went unseen.

He bestowed it only upon this small ward, though he himself knew not why. And the Great Demon Lord had a suspicion that his Rin, for all her dull human senses, knew of this smile, even if she could not see it, for she would always glow a little brighter in its light.

-Except today, when little Rin practically illuminated the campsite, but Sesshoumaru found that he could not smile.

Looking down at the still attached Rin, he wondered why. Her presence pleased him inexplicably more than usual, but the ability to command the stoic muscles of his face, to stretch and slide over one another even a fraction, seemed lost to him.

Rin would have to go smile-less today.

"_Sesshoumaru-sama!"_

Ah, yes. Then there would be the demand for what he had brought her today. He rarely answered this question, and he expected that she was not anticipating anything in particular either, but she would still ask, and he continued to allow her to ask. He had a theory that this was just her segue into a long and elaborate bid for attention.

But today he thought that maybe the routine gave her the same comfort it did him.

_Sesshoumaru-sama!_

"Rin," he would say- that single syllable being question, invitation, inquiry, and command. And she would open her mouth, and spew forth a rhapsody of her day; what she had done; how the day had went; the activities of Ah-un, and the trials of Jaken. She would quiet when he wished it, and she would chatter on when he wished. He did not have to listen, but occasionally he chose to. He enjoyed her small tugs that brought him back down to mortal earth. Sometimes, being a perfect and almost divine creation made him distanced from all else that lived. He looked to the moon and the stars so much that the nuances of the earth he belonged to and looked over escaped him. Like the flowers, and the worms, that she brought him. The frogs and the saplings and the cherry blossoms. These were fleeting things, brief and insignificant. But they were also like Rin, so it made him pay attention.

There was a power to briefness, he remembered his father's voice saying, from long ago, the thought coiling inside him now, although, still, he could not understand it.

She would always chatter at the beginning of his appearances, because she knew, though he had never told her, that that was when he relished in her childish prattle most. It felt, hearing her livelihood, smelling her earthen scent, seeing her non-celestial glow, like coming home.

Though never physically tired, there was a fatigue in his bones that he carried with him constantly; Her voice was like a balm to that leaden feeling. The Lord of the West welcomed it. And the way he did that was with that single syllable- "_Rin". Speak to me._

-Except, he could not say it today. His tongue seemed glued to the roof of his mouth and his jaw felt hard and too heavy to move. Again, he tried working his facial muscles, but nothing would work. In his heart of hearts, Sesshoumaru was not feeling very pleased today. Dull emotions curdled inside his heart of hearts, and he distantly noted that they were mainly confusion and anger. Looking down at the radiant face of the small human again, he wondered why.

He _was_ pleased, but then why was he so… not? The thin note of discomfort lay over everything around him, including Rin. He hated unknown shadows hovering over Rin, but this unknown was caused by him. It was from deep within him, where a seething anger teetered at the brink of overflowing. The anger- though dull, still, and far from the surface- kept lapping and growing in momentum as he tried in vain to keep it away from Rin.

_Sesshoumaru-sama…_

Her voice was more reluctant now. Sesshoumaru frowned. (He could frown, apparently). In that place inside him, where muted emotions lurked, his heart clenched tightly. It hated her reluctance even more than the shadow. The shallow anger gained a bit more colour.

But this time it made sense; Sesshoumaru never liked it when Rin was hesitant or hurt. Of course he was angry.

So he tried again-

"Rin." _Tell me what you want to say._

The name came out like a whisper from his lips. It was soft and feeble. Sesshoumaru was almost embarrassed, except that such a phenomenon had never occurred to him. He decided that to Rin and Jaken, it would merely have sounded disinterested and nobly quiet. (Of course it was still insulting for this Sesshoumaru to be thought of as disinterested when he did not intend it, but he would take that over "feeble".)

Still smiling, though significantly less brightly, Rin opened her mouth.

"Sesshoumaru-sama. I humbly beg for your forgivness. Please wake UP!"

Sesshoumaru blinked.

_What…?_

Rin let go of his leg, and as if there were a vortex behind her, sucking her towards it, she diminished backwards. He did not understand what was going on, and though the cavern inside him was pulsing loud enough that it was disturbing him, he merely stood there. Like a tape on rewind, before he could open his mouth, the scene had taken Rin back over the hill, running backwards, the green landscape dimming, turning black with dapples of white, and then there was no more Rin and scene blackened entirely.

Sesshoumaru closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, it was to a deep red drape that glowed with the fiery strength of the mid-morning sun behind it. The light stabbed through his pupils before they constricted. Were he a lesser Youkai, he might have winced. His heart still beat loudly against his chest. Closing his eyes again, Sesshoumaru quieted it at once.

When he reopened them he saw a flash of green and then there was the stealth sounds of a pertrified servant tiptoeing away down the hall, as fast as demonly possible.

Using one clawed hand ,Sesshoumaru raised it from the folds of his hakamas and settled it on the cool red silk, intending, at first, to pull it away. The texture kissed the tips of his claws gently and he thought immediately of flower petals. Changing his mind immediately, he burnt the drapes instead. There was a short sizzling sound, and then there were drapes no more. The poison travelled deliciously fast, and soon all the drapes surrounding the bed lay in a disintegrated pool of smoking venom around him.

Sesshoumaru breathed in the fume. He gave his hand a flex and felt the prickling sensation of his relaxing poison ducts.

The desperate feeling of something swiftly being removed from his grasp filled him once more. He flexed his hand again, frowning in thought. There had been a thought, an image that he had wanted really badly, which had visited him… again. There was an undertone of a denied pleasure to it, like a hunger sated but merely by illusion.

A dream.

It took one more effort of stretching backwards into the sequence of thought until he found it, and remembered.

_Rin._

The muted coils of anger and confusion came to life. _Rin_. Of course. And with that single thought, a thousand thoughts, feelings and moments came crashing back to him.

Lord Sesshoumaru was awake, and it was one more empty, and colorless day of the past 30 years without Rin that he woke to.

**NOW... TO REVIEWING!**


	2. Chapter two: Basking

**Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha.**

**A man lies and dreams of green fields and rivers,  
But awakes to a morning with no reason for waking  
He's haunted by the memory of a lost paradise  
In his youth or a dream, he can't be precise  
He's chained forever to a world that's departed  
It's not enough, it's not enough- Pink Floyd, _Sorrow_**

* * *

***

She was standing in front of the tree again. The cool breeze of the courtyard swam around her as if she was not there at all. In the midst of the occasional fluttering leaf, Kagome stood as still as she could, with her eyes closed tight.

The sun overhead was at it's zenith, rays of its strong light shining scattered, through the dappled leaves of Goshinboku. As she waited for the slowly heating splotches of the sun on her skin to becoming unbearable, Kagome let herself escape, for a short while, into the realm of delusion.

Breathing shallowly the toxic air of Tokyo, Kagome imagined it changed to the mossy smells of an ancient forest. Where the empty swooshing sound of the wind brushing against the bark of the tree sounded, she imagined it curling and dragging through the many folds of a rat-skin kimono.

Lashes shaking with the effort to keep the real world out, Kagome saw, felt- _remembered- _a slumbering hanyou glowing in the afternoon light, before her. She saw his gentle sighs of breath, the shadow of his closed lashes stretched down in the light until they were brushing the tops of his high cheek bones; his white hair, looping, uncontrolled, in the breeze, and his high, pointy ears, limp and unsensing begging to be touched.

Holding still her withering body around an aching heart, Kagome's hands slowly curled open, palms out.

Basking in the memories of what had never been.


End file.
